Crisis Dodged

THIS ABOVE ALL--Eric Knight--Harper ($2.50).

This is the first novel of any real stature to come out of World War II. Under the steely immediacies of England's sky, it should make sensational reading. Even at a relatively comfortable distance, it has points that break the skin.

Main part of the narrative is the classical setup for all war fiction from worst to best: a soldier, a girl, the soldier's friend. The girl, Prudence, is upper-class, erving in the W.A.A.F. Clive, on leave after Dunkirk, is an intelligent, self-educated Yorkshireman of the working lass. They meet, spar, land in a haystack, any their uneasy affair to a vacant hotel in a south-coast resort. There, in a much more profuse and coarse-grained way, they settle down to the business of A Farewell to Arms: bedding, drinking, eating, quareling, comedy, conversation. Prudence has a good head and heart but is soaked to the scalp in the reflexes of her class; Clive is sore, experienced, articulate, discourteous. It makes for a lively debate and, with the friend's arrival, for some harsh and vivid reminiscences of World Wars I and II.

Height of the debate is a furious 39-page chapter in which Clive explains at biographical length just why he no longer proposes to risk his life for the upper classes. His arguments, neither politically rigid nor in any sense pacifist, are extraordinarily hot stuff to serve up in wartime. He does not persist in his desertion; but his change of heart is not so solidly developed as his anger. Hence This Above All, though full of provocative data, is in the long run a disappointment. For Eric Knight merely mutters some phrases about the wisdom of the heart and a need for faith, dodges the whole crisis by bumping off his hero, gives his pregnant heroine a tag line about fighting it her way (unquestioning patriotism) now, and changing to Clive's way (Leftward) when war is done.

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